Resistors have been previously used in supplying current to line circuits in telephony, these resistors being connected to a direct voltage source (usually-48 V), speech modulation being executed with the aid of a transformer (the speech transformer), as will be seen from the U.S. Pat. No. 4,056,689, for example. Linear amplifiers are used alternatively for the same purpose, a so-called class S amplifier described in "Circuits and Systems" IEEE, Volume 7, No. 10, December 1975.